"moving from episodic to continuous learning -- getting a degree doesn't end your education any more and everyone will have to continue to learn
moving away from having faculty that were the conveyers of content to -- now that there's so much more information available -- becoming more curators of the content, of helping guide all the sources,
some thought that the emphasis on degrees may be reduced as other kinds of assessments come into play,
"If we recognize the need to organize ourselves differently, deliver education differently, then how do we fund it, how do we govern it?"
moving away from students being associated with an individual institution to students aggregating their own educations from a whole variety of sources and players
although there are counselors and advisers available in higher education "what a lot of people need is more of a coach, not necessarily associated with a particular institution
needs to reorganize itself to serve students
digital badges that signify various accomplishments
It simply doesn’t make sense to try
to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.” His listener, almost giddy
with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers
the punch line: That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start .
. . blaming students!
His focus is not on
students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids)
but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized
tests)
As
I’ve noted elsewhere,
we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context
of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or
what contributes to a democratic culture
Upon hearing someone castigate students for being
insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two
questions. The first is: “Motivated to do what, exactly”? Anything they’re
told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?
Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for
a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet,
listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of
a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by
Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management: “Idleness,
indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to
absurd work.”
The more you reward people for doing something, or for
doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they
had to do to get the reward.
People
who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational
success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to
see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat
their corporations. The sort of schooling that results is the type almost
guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of
rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning
is just a means to an end.
Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant
primarily to raise test scores.
inner-city kids get the worst of the
sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning
but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read:
obedient).
“Motivation is weak because more
students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.” But why
don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his
premise is correct, they don’t succeed)? What has happened to their desire
to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which
all children start out?
if you want to see
(intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that
take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more
likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is
not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but
meaningful.
Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
This site has a 30 second blurb on many topics that we teach from the money supply to Henri Matisse from the space station to the properties of chemicals.
Qwiki allows users to learn more about a variety of topics through multimedia and storytelling. Users can also contribute content to make Qwiki even better.
Qwiki instantly makes a 1 minute educational movie on any topic. A must try resource! Works by typing in a search term. Great for visual/auditory learners... and teachers. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
So why do I use Diigo?
I like its ability to enhance my bookmarking with highlights and sticky notes, that are retained with the page when I go back to it.
I like that you can highlight and publish easily from Diigo to you blog or an email, and a reference appears automatically along with the posting.
I like the ability to create lists on specific topics that can be shared.
I like the ability to create groups to pool resources for specific subjects. I recently joined a few Diigo groups and have had some very useful sites brought to my attention.
I like that you can access and search the bookmarks anywhere by full-text and tags.
I like to search for the most popular bookmarks on a particular subject.
I like the different ways to share and aggregate information that Diigo offers. I have set it up so that a list of my new bookmarks appears on this blog on a weekly basis but this is just one option. You can now choose to automatically
The tool bar is easy to download and makes it easy to use and aspect of Diigo whenever you are on line.
Of course you can keep things private if you choose to but that is really defeating the purpose of Diigo in the first place.
Diigo also began offering, on Sept 19th, a Diigo Education Account Facility. I haven’t investigated this yet but a post about it was put onto the SLAV Bright Ideas blog. It is worth looking at. From Diigo
‘The Diigo Educator Accounts offer a suite of features that makes it incredibly easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful web annotation and social bookmarking technology.’
For an educator account, you do have to apply and fill out how/why you want to use Diigo in your school.
But most importantly we are interesed in e-portfolios because there is emerging, often powerful evidence from practitioners and learners of how e-portfolios can promote more profound forms of learning, as well their further potential in supporting for example transition between institutions and stages of education, and in supporting professional development and applications for professional accreditation.
An e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback etc. which 'presents' a selected audience with evidence of a person's learning and/or ability
Behind any product, or presentation, lie rich and complex processes of planning, synthesising, sharing, discussing, reflecting, giving, receifing and responding to feedback.
Descriptions of e-portfolio processes also tend to include the concepts of learners drawing from both informal and and formal learning activities to create their e-portfolios
instead of using failure as a valuable teaching tool, education discourages it as, well, a sign of failure
each assignment is graded based on its proximity to success, and the final grade is determined by the aggregate of each individual grade, failure is preserved and carried with the student throughout the course. The result is that students become failure-adverse, demoralized by failure, and focused more on the grade than the education.
reverse this trend is by using gaming in education. Students who fail in video games do not suffer the same blow to their self-esteem as those who receive a low grade on an exam or report card. They simply try it again
when a student hands in a paper he is given comments and told to rewrite it, and must rewrite it over and over until it is an A-quality paper. Only then it is accepted.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
Augmentation/Apply: Using a simple yet powerful tool for visualization like GeoGebra, students explore the concepts covered in the resources described in 1., and solve related standard problems. The scope and number of the problems is not governed by what is available in the “back of the book,” but rather driven by the evolution of student understanding, as measured by suitable formative assessment processes.
Substitution/Remember: Students use ebooks and other Open Education Resources to acquire basic knowledge about statistical tools and procedures.
2. Substitution/Understand: At the same time, they begin a process of gathering information online describing applications of these statistical tools to an area of interest to them, using simple bookmark aggregation services (e.g., Diigo, Delicious) to collect and tag these resources, relating them to the knowledge gained in 1.
Cached
